Concept Of Folklore Research Articles

Methods of teaching folklore in secondary school

Relevance. Folk songs, fairy tales, riddles, and tongue twisters are important for their emotional impact on a person, and the study of folklore allows a better understanding and feeling the spirit of the people, their worldview, culture, and history. The relevance of the study is based on the fact that at the present stage, due attention is paid to the use of folklore in the educational process in secondary school. Purpose. The purpose of the study: determine the role of folklore in the educational process through the conducted analysis of knowledge in secondary schools of Kazakhstan, identify the main genres of folklore, show the main techniques and methods of teaching folklore. Methodology. Comparative, descriptive, deductive, axiomatic, dogmatic, and abstraction methods and the method of analysis and synthesis were used to clarify this subject. Results. The result of the study was the definition of the concept of folklore and consideration of the classification of genres. The empirical part of the study consists of a survey conducted among 44 pupils, and a survey of 15 teachers of the highest category of secondary schools in Kazakhstan on the methodology of teaching folklore, its impact on the upbringing of the younger generation, and the activation of the educational process in general. Conclusions. The study examines Kazakh folklore and its components, shows the model of teaching folklore at school. The study allowed identifying certain features and assessing the prospect of further introduction of folklore teaching methods into the educational system of Kazakhstan, and developing recommendations for studying Kazakh folklore for grades 5-6. The practical importance of this subject is due to the main methodological aspects that affect the effectiveness of the use of certain methods of teaching folklore in secondary schools. Keywords: learning process; teacher; educational system; oral folk art; traditions

Yeats as a Folklorist: The Celtic Twilight and the Irish Folklore

W.B. Yeats had a key role in the Irish folklore. Before writing his masterpieces, often arising froman original encounter between folklore and literature, the young Yeats was directly concerned withthe collecting of folklore. Initially he had worked as an editor, drawing his material from a varietyof XIX century’s narrative collections; however, through this editing he had already sketched hisown idea of folklore. With his later work, The Celtic Twilight, Yeats became a first-hand collector,thus acting as a folklorist. A singular kind of folklorist, indeed, who addressed his materialaccording to views and goals quite distant from the canonical approach of an ethnographic research.His was the approach of a writer seeking in folklore a different kind of literature. Hence, are welegitimized to regard Yeats as a folklorist? How to evaluate his unorthodox methodology? Was hisapproach unsuitable? Or, perhaps, by treating his material as a dynamic, living issue, rather than astatic, outdated item, was this approach more fitting for understanding folklore? These are somequestions I discuss in my paper, so as to develop a critical reassessment of the concept of folklore,its methods and aims.

Designing a Tourist Logo Inspired by the Folklore of Al-Qunfudhah Governorate of Saudi Arabia

This study aimed to identify the concept of folklore, its significance, the role of tourism and culture and their impact on the economy. It also aimed at creating a tourist logo inspired by the Saudi folklore of Al-Qunfudah Governorate, and use the Saudi folklore in Al-Qunfudhah Governorate in designing the tourist logo. Another objective was to present a proposed tourism logo that contributes to encouraging the employment of folklore in designs. The researcher used the descriptive research which aims at casting light on current issues or problems through a process of data collection that enables them to describe the situation more completely than was possible without employing this method (Fox, 2007). The study has produced different tourist logos inspired by the Saudi folklore of Al-Qunfudah Governorate. The researchers have presented some recommendations as follows: Making use of heritage and historical sources in highlighting the national identity. Paying more attention to the design of tourism logos by researchers, because the tourism logo has a great role that no one else can perform, and the correct promotion process can only be done with it. Designing tourist souvenir products based on the logo to highlight the national identity of Al-Qunfudhah Governorate. Developing curriculum units for school students in various artistic fields to be concerned with preserving and documenting traditional folk arts. Conducting more studies and future research in the field of traditional folk arts, especially for Al-Qunfudhah Governorate.

The Memory of Performance: From Contents to Contexts of Selected Tharu Folk Dances

The major objective of this paper is to analyze the historical context of the Dangaura Tharu folk dances of Nepal. The study discusses the Tharu subjectivity by assessing the performance as an agency. The primary discussion is based on the issue of Kamaiyahood in the songs narrated during the dance of the community. Dangaura Tharu ethnicity resides across five Tarai districts of Nepal: Dang, Banke, Bardiya, Kailali and Kanchanpur. This study is to identify and evaluate the role of memory in the folk performance of the community. It concludes by justifying the abundance of Kamaiyahood, spatial memory and empathy for nature in the community's folk performance. To collect the data required for the study, this study has adopted the qualitative research method, using the techniques such as direct observation, interview and relevant documents to understand the performing arts and rituals of the Tharus of Nepal. In addition, to analyze the collected data, Richard Schechner's idea of performance as a fortitude for identity has been applied critically. In addition, Alan Dunde's concept of folklore as the identity has also been considered. Thus, the study finds the memory of displacement inherent in the Tharu folk dance. The spatial memory and the Kamaiyahood appear as the dominant motifs in Dangaura Tharu folk performance. Since the dance of the community comprises the songs, reflecting the symbols and their meanings of the dances, for each dance has been critically analyzed in the paper.

Reflections of the Lithuanian World in the Literature Textbooks from the DP Camps: Analyzing the Concept of Folklore

The article deals with the literature textbook published in Augsburg, Germany, in 1946 and entitled “Synopsis of the Lithuanian Literature”. It was edited by a Lithuanian writer and teacher Petronėlė Orintaitė-Janutienė, and its sources included a textbook “The Lithuanian Literature: Part 1”, published in the interwar Lithuania (in 1939) and edited by Motiejus Miškinis. However, Orintaitė-Janutienė emphasized having used the publication by Miškinis only “a little”, while writing all the rest “from the memory”. Therefore, the article aims to elucidate what image of the Lithuanian world this memory-based textbook rendition impressed upon the young person studying at a war refugees’ camp, what support it proposed, and what kind of experience it prepared the young one for. The more detailed analysis focuses on the part from the textbook that briefly outlined the concept of folklore. This choice is grounded in the idea nationalism theory that oral culture bears special significance to the formation of the nationality and development of the national consciousness. The analysis also includes some folklore texts from the literary supplement (also edited by Orintaitė-Janutienė) to the Lithuanian weakly Žiburiai (‘Lights’), published in Augsburg in 1945–1949. The author notes that the outline of the Lithuanian folklore in the textbook and the selection of the folklore samples stemmed from the interwar Lithuanian schooling tradition, but they also reflected reaction to the complicated historical situation, in view of which the national community had to rally and act together, discovering new alternatives for survival. The analyzed material allows the author to conclude that the national consciousness of the Lithuanian student at the DP camp was strengthened by presenting certain past experiences inherited from the ancestors, by fostering the idea of historical continuity, by reviving and cherishing the topographic memory, emphasizing the most important existential attitudes, and listing the culture texts testifying to the Lithuanian national distinction.

Environment-Wise Fishing Practice in Coastal Regions in Indonesia

This study on Indonesia culture is concerned with environment-wise values in fishing practice in Indonesian archipelago. This study is performed because passages about the values have seemed scattered here and there, and this study is intended to specifically exemplify the values in the fishing practice in coastal regions of West Nusa Tenggara, Maluku, Aceh, North Sulawesi, and Central Java. This study adopts Sims’s concept of folklore, and this study applies a textual analysis. The textual analysis results in fishing traditions in each of the coastal regions; in addition, the traditions contain local wisdom about environment conservation. It is expected that this study will be beneficial for any reader interested in Indonesian culture in general, and in local wisdom in fishing society in particular.

The Concept of Folklore: An Overview of the Psychoanalytic Reading of Folklores

Stories have always found a special place in every society and a story teller has had listeners hung on to his or her every word breathlessly for ages . These stories were of myriad quality ranging from comic to heroic, from fables featuring animal as anthropomorphic to fantasy with goblins and fairies. The term folk lore or folk tale is used in English to refer to fairy tales in English such as Cinderella or snow White ,Folk Tales in the broader sense of the term includes all forms of prose narrative , written or oral which are handed down through generations. The modern story telling differs from the traditional folk tale in one important aspect. The modern storyteller emphasizes on the originality of the material. Whereas the teller of the folk tale prides on the fact that he 0r she can pass down the folklores almost verbatim. The folk teller can also uses their own embellishment in the tale in order to mesmerize their audience .It is therefore difficult to separate the oral from the written in folk tale because it travels mostly orally and no folk tale can be traced back to any one writer. Which is to say that maybe the oral stories need not have been always oral . But once the story teller or the raconteur recites it in the public, it becomes more of something to tell to the listener and not something to be read. Historically these public spaces where raconteur and poets recited the popular tales, been the major source of entertainment for the general public. Ancient Greek performed popular plays for the public and there was a stress on the oral recitation and the concept of catharsis or the purgation of the feelings of pity and fear. This art of story telling is not bound by any segment of the society or civilization but is ubiquitously present . It is older than history itself and it travels orally through continents and through space and time. It may differ from place to place but it exists to fulfill one social function and an important human need, which is entertainment. There also exist a curiosity about history or the legends. The oral recitation of heroic tales and legends lend an almost pride like quality among the listeners. The legends of the heros are mostly about their tribes or society and they represent the ideals of honour, pride and virtue for the entire tribe. India as a diverse and culturally rich county has written literature going thousands of years back before Homer .

Regilaul tuulte pöörises. Eesti folkloristika poliitiliste muutuste ajajärgul 20. sajandi keskel / Regilaul in the whirlpool. Estonian folkloristics during the political changes in the middle of the 20th century

Artikli eesmärk on jälgida regilaulu kui Eesti folkloristika paraadžanri käekäiku Eesti sovetiseerimise ajajärgul 1940.–1950. aastatel ja selle kaudu eesti folkloristide kohandumisi muutuva teaduspoliitikaga. Kuna sõjajärgset Eestit võib lugeda koloniseerituks Nõukogude Liidu poolt, tuvastatakse sotskolonialismi tunnuseid Eesti sõjajärgses folkloristikas. Vaatluse alla võetakse regilaulu muutuv positsioon ametlikus retseptsioonis ning folkloristlikel välitöödel. Kuna nõukogude ajajärku esitatakse sageli eesti rahvakultuuri õitseajana, vaadeldakse lähemalt rahvaloomingu viljelemist harrastajate ja professionaalsete kunstnike tasemel, rahvusliku vormi sotsialistliku sisuga täitmist. The purpose of the paper is to follow how Estonian folklorists adapted changing science policy in the 1940s and 1950s, and how an elite genre of the Estonian folklore – regilaul – was treated in the course of the Sovietization of Estonian humanities and cultural life.There are several distinctive features of the Soviet colonization in the post-war Estonian folkloristics. First, an extensive reform of the organization of the academic institutions took place in annexed Estonia, following the example of organizational structures in Soviet Russia’s Academy of Sciences.The most specific feature of the Soviet colonialism was the extremely strong dependence of the peripheries on the colonial centre. Academic life in Estonia was guided by the resolutions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which were observed and monitored closely by local authorities at the plenary meetings of the Estonian Communist Party and further discussed at the meetings of local academic institutions. These discussions were followed by waves of reassessments, (self) criticism and repressions. Folklorists from the Baltic republics were supervised and “assisted” by Russian folklorists in terms of the methods of the Soviet folkloristics at the union-wide conferences held in Moscow, the Soviet colonial centre. Direct models were taken over to reorganize folkloristic fieldwork and research in the spirit of the new ideology.The third specific feature of the Soviet colonialism was the adaption of Soviet pidgin, colonial discourse, which proliferated especially during the last years of the Stalinist era, from 1948 to 1953. Research in any discipline was limited by the Marxist method; any deflection in it was considered renegade and therefore punishable. In Estonian folkloristics, however, the mastering of the Marxist method comprised largely of clever usage of the colonists’ slogans and formulae, such as “bourgeois-nationalist”, “formalism”, “cosmopolitanism” versus “internationalism”, “objectivism”, and “anti-patriotic” etc. Oft-repeated labels carried no actual meaning; far from any rationale, they were rather formulaic weapons of fighting with enemies, tools of revaluing and (self) criticism. In the end of the 1950s, the use of most grievous lexis declined, but in general, the Soviet discourse was adapted.The altering position of regilaul in the folkloristic writings and fieldwork is discussed in the paper. The last years of the Stalinism, the hierarchy of the folklore genres was turned upside down and classical folklore genres were marginalized because mainstream Soviet folkloristics were focused on contemporary “Soviet folklore” and amateur cultural activities. Estonian folklorists adapted the new reality expeditiously, implementing a sort of mimicry. Fieldwork was carried on in areas with vivid traditional culture, such as Setumaa and Kihnu Island, using the collection of Soviet folklore as pretext. Folklorists did not change their collecting methods and continued to collect traditional folklore genres. Examples of contemporary “folk creations” were documented randomly and unsystematically; all the more were these findings proudly brought before the public at the union-wide forums and in the local press. In these years, curiosa like eulogies to the Lenin and Stalin, collective farms and the Soviet Army in the form of regilaul were documented.After the death of Stalin, Estonian folklorists returned to the classical folklore genres, though overemphasizing the motifs of “class struggle” and “heroism of the working crowds” in the old oral poetry.Due to the existing stereotypes regarding favouring ethnic minorities and folk culture under the Soviet regime, the paper takes a closer look to the use of folklore or/and folk creations at both the amateur and professional level of cultural activities. Although Soviet propaganda hailed the blossoming of the folk cultural activities, not all branches of the folk culture were allowed to blossom. Certainly, “folk” and “national” cannot be seen as synonyms. The concept of folklore was blurred because of the parallel concept of folk creations, which included non-traditional cultural activities. Folklorists were forced to deal with amateur cultural activities. In the professional level, the slogan of “socialist content in national form” marked deterioration, simplification and impoverishment regarding means of artistic expression. Instead of folklore pieces, the national epic “Kalevipoeg” was used as an exemplary to the professional artistic creations. Because of sophisticated stylistic features and lyricist mood of regilaul, conflicting to the Soviet aesthetics, becoming inspired by the regilaul tradition was out of the question for artists of the Stalinist era. Enforced simplicity and conservatism caused innovation in literary and musical creations in 1960s, broadening the use of regilaul in professional culture.

The Haunted Discipline: On the Political Nature of Folklore and the Political Destiny of Its Study

Referring to Italian examples, the paper focuses on the resilient concept of folklore as an objective and given set of cultural expressions, that has been haunting the discipline since its inception under the Romantic approach, and characterized the use that totalitarian regimes had been making of it. Since the second half of the last century, however, folklore scholarship could count on newer perspectives, drawn on the systematization of Gramsci’s legacy, which frankly addresses its socio-political nature, and, by extension, the political relevance of its scholarship. Such a peculiar approach needs to be reconfirmed today, so as to cope with the returning temptations of a neutral approach within the contemporary heritage turn. Gramsci’s legacy, cultural heritage turn, engaged folklore, political approach, Italian folklore studies

De gauchos, criollos y folklores: los conceptos detrás de los términos

The paper examines the different meanings these terms acquired in a handful of argentine literature theorists during the first half of the XXth Century. Followed and conditioned by the various assessments of the gaucho and the criollo, the concept of folklore is based upon underlying binary oppositions such as high/popular culture; orality/literacy; rural/urban realm; native/alien; traditional means of communication/mass media. A presentation of the contributions of Ernesto Quesada, Ricardo Rojas, Robert Lehmann-Nitsche, and Juan Alfonso Carrizo, among others, will allow us to understand how these pairs interact in the assembling of the various definitions of folklore, in which the significance of native, Hispanic, and European elements also played an important role.

Música, espacio andino y “habitus de clase”: el caso del singular compositor argentino Rolando “Chivo” Valladares

■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ABSTRACT: In spite of being considered as one of the greatest folklore composers of Argentina, the work and the thought of the Rolando Chivo Valladares (1918-2008) is little known. Considering the factors that had a bearing on his formation, this article examines his criticism of the concept of folklore, his questioning to the effect of the market on the musical reception, and his rapprochement to ancestral musical practices from the north of Argentina. His ideas are contrasted with those of other prominent folklore practitioners and researchers (his sister Leda, Atahualpa Yupanqui, and Augusto Raul Cortazar); then, his categories of tren- zado and despojamiento (plaiting and dispossession) are analyzed, because they highlight the suspension of the ideological schema of musician and poet required by the act of collaborative composition. In this way, this case would show an exception to the category of class habitus, proposed by Pierre Bourdieu, while it may be considered an expression of border thinking, in the sense that it proposes the conversion of the urban subject to Andean structures of feeling, through music. ■ ■ ■

EVENT TIME AND INTERPRETATION TIME: ANALYSIS OF THE INTERACTION OF TIMES

1. Introduction It is characteristic of oral folklore that a text is adapted to the situation where it is performed. This gives folklore text its flexibility. The actual performance of oral folklore also establishes the moment of time. While the text itself cannot be changed, it is the time of performance that will influence further interpretations of the text. In this article I will observe one such connection between the time of event and the time of interpretation, by using the example of an educational film made in the 1950s about pre-modern wedding traditions. I will show how, in spite of the pursuits of the film's authors, modern interpretations amplify not only the timeless element of folk traditions, but also the actual time of the filming. The additional film-related sources and the relevant research help to more specifically understand and perceive the interrelated connection of times. For theoretical background, it is important to emphasise the changes that took place in folklore studies in the second half of the 20th century, including the change in the definition of folklore. The film in question was created during a period when the research of folklore was focusing on objects. It means that it was possible to categorize texts (for instance, a description of wedding traditions) thus enabling their collection or recording without affecting the understanding about the specific subject matter. When researchers started to regard folklore as a specific type of communication (see, for instance, the works of Dan Ben-Amos from the 1970s), the performance situation began influencing the concept of folklore. In his article Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context, Dan BenAmos showed that folklore acted as a communicative process in the cultural context, as opposed to the earlier concept that regarded folklore as a set of certain phenomena (songs, stories, traditions, etc.) (Ben-Amos 1971). The filmmakers drew a distinction between the wedding traditions that were being described and the daily life of people who knew and carried these traditions forward. (1) It can be claimed that people's traditions and their modern-day activities were handled as two essentially isolated phenomena in the film. But when folklore is regarded in the cultural setting as part of this system, the main focus will not be on individual cultural phenomena, but on persons and their actions. (2) Therefore, people interpreting the film today tend to focus less on ancient wedding traditions and more on the community acting in the given time and space. I have analysed the film on two levels: first, the film's reception by students today, including aspects related to the past, rhetoric and folkloristic principles, and, second, new contexts in the interpretation process that I created by including film-related materials and by monitoring folkloristic changes of paradigm. 2. Research source and issues The film in question--Wedding Traditions of Kihnu Island--was completed in the Film Studio of Tartu State University in 1956. (3) The film's authors defined it as a documentary to be used as a supplement to the study course on Estonian folklore. The film's research consultant was Eduard Laugaste, the then associate professor for folklore at Tartu University, and his assistants were folklorists Veera Pino and Udo Kolk. One of the students who took part in the filming was Ottilie Koiva, who later studied the same geographical region and subject matter more thoroughly. (4) As today, researchers in the past were similarly attracted by the ancient feature of Kihnu weddings. In her description of these weddings, folklorist Ingrid Ruutel emphasises the fact that these folk traditions have been preserved from pre-Christian times to the present day: Fundamentally, the Kihnu wedding is a so-called tribal wedding that confirms an agreement made between two tribes. It is based on family society, on pre-Christian religious concepts and is generally characteristic of the Balto-Finnic nations. …

The Discovery of Irish Folklore

The Discovery of Irish Folklore Anne Markey Anyone interested in Irish literature, whether in the Irish or the English language, will be familiar with the concept of folklore. For those whose knowledge is confined to works in the English language, the concept often remains nebulous because the collection, study, and discussion of Irish folklore during the twentieth century have largely been undertaken through the medium of Irish. The resultant system of academic specialization has led to a persistent tendency, among critics and other commentators, to occlude the relationship between Irish folklore and Irish writing in English—though during the latter half of the twentieth century a few significant studies have investigated continuities between the Gaelic tradition, associated with Irish folklore, and the Anglo-Irish literary tradition.1 Nevertheless, within and outside academic circles, many remain confused about what constitutes Irish folklore, and what its relationship is, or should be, to literature. Although the concept was already familiar to antiquaries interested in popular traditions and to an English-speaking reading public that had been introduced to Edgar Taylor's translation of Grimms' Kinder-und Hausmärchen in 1823, the term "folklore" was not coined until 1846 when the English antiquary William John Thoms, under the pseudonym Ambrose Merton, first used the term in a letter published in the English periodical, The Athenaeum. In an effort to align English scholarship with the work of the Brothers Grimm in Germany, Thoms proposed "a good Saxon compound, Folk-Lore—the Lore of the People" to denote "the manners, customs observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, &c of the olden time." Lamenting the loss of much such material, Thoms sought aid "in garnering the few ears which are remaining, scattered over that field from which our forefathers might have gathered a goodly crop."2 The letter raises [End Page 21] issues that would be reflected in the subsequent development of folklore scholarship. The word "folklore" is a relatively modern label, coined to describe a body of material at a time when it seemed threatened with extinction. As Diarmuid Ó Giolláin has remarked, " 'Folklore' appeared as it was disappearing, it was discovered as it was being lost, [and] it was recovered as it ceased to be."3 Thoms's founding conception of folklore links it to agrarian tradition, and conceptualizes it as a vestigial antithesis to modernity. Furthermore, the designation of the term folklore as "a good Saxon compound" introduces an element of national ideology that persisted in the subsequent development of folkloric discourse. The Irish term béaloideas, meaning "oral instruction" dates back at least as far as the seventeenth century, but was not used as a translation for the term "folklore" until 1927.4 Fifty years later, Bo Almqvist, head of the Department of Irish Folklore in University College Dublin, defined Irish folklore as "all such things as are mentioned and enquired about in A Handbook of Irish Folklore" and asserted that this covered "the totality of folk culture, spiritual and material."5 Seán Ó Súilleabháin's comprehensive A Handbook of Irish Folklore, a 1942 guide for collectors, contains questions arranged thematically under the fifteen distinct categories.6 Thus, according to the definition that underpinned the development and establishment of Irish folklore as an academic discipline in the Republic of Ireland, "folklore" consists of a variety of material conditions, cultural practices, and traditions. Notably, the academic study of Irish folklore in the Irish Free State, and later, the Republic, has concentrated on narrative traditions, and particularly on the collection and classification of oral narratives from Irish-speaking areas.7 This contrasts with Northern Ireland, where folklore scholarship has tended to focus more on material culture, customs, and folklife in general.8 The Southern concentration [End Page 22] on narrative reflects the central place of the folktale in international folklore scholarship which, until the late 1960s—using the typology devised by the Finn Antti Aarne in 1910 and expanded by the American Stith Thompson in 1961—was concerned with classification by motif and tale type.9 In the Irish context, the privileging of Gaeltacht areas led to a process described by Diarmuid Ó Giolláin as "the Gaelicisation of Irish folklore."10 Ó Giolláin refers to...

The Folklore of Northern Scotland: Five Discourses on Cultural Representation

How is it possible to do justice, in the limits of this lecture, to the folklore of Northern Scotland, a relatively vast, unevenly populated area--roughly one sixth of the land area of the British mainland--that stretches from Iona in the west to Unst in the Shetland Isles, from the Angus and Perthshire glens to the Outer Hebrides? It would be relatively easy, suppose, if superficial and repetitive, to summarise the folklore that has been amassed over two and a half centuries. It would be less easy, but probably more instructive, to survey the lore that has spread from this region as a result of extensive and prolonged emigration over the same period. It would also be useful, no doubt, to discuss the work of students of the region in the past century and a half, from John Francis Campbell of Islay to John Lorne Campbell of Canna, from John Gregorson Campbell to Walter Gregor or Margaret Fay Shaw, or even the obscure Janet Henderson of Wick, who towards the end of last century wrote to the Folklore Society offering them a book on Caithness folklore.(1) Finally, given the need to rethink our concepts and methods from time to time, we might review, with special attention to Northern Scotland, changing notions of folklore and folklife, ethnology, material culture, oral tradition, and the like. Recent discussions have taken place on the relationship between ethnology and folklore (Fenton 1993) and between folklore and identity (Oring, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Glassie 1994). Folklorists still grapple with terminology as they trace the lineage and current meaning of keywords such as tradition, art, text, group, performance, genre, and context (Feintuch 1995). To these should certainly be added special usages of more recent vintage, such as heritage and cultural tourism (see Fladmark 1993; 1994; Brewer 1994; Wells 1996). Relating concepts of this sort to contemporary work on Northern Scottish traditions would be a daunting but not unmanageable task.(2) But prefer to do something different and set forth what see as a set of current discourses constructed around the folklore of Northern Scotland. use the term discourse because it implicitly rejects the idea of folklore as solely a product of communal imagination or individual aesthetic sense. Rather, the production of folklore is also intimately related to power relations in society, to economic factors, to public institutions and to academic disciplines (see Tilley 1991, 153). My justification for this stance lies in the huge population shifts that have taken place in Northern Scotland, not merely in the past twenty-five years but in the past two hundred and fifty years, and the abuse of the Highlands in particular by human agency such as improvers or absentee landowners. The first of these population displacements was due to the coming of North Sea Oil around 1965 and immigration into the North East associated with it; the second to the upheaval of the Highland Clearances, the mid-nineteenth century potato famine that is better known from Ireland, and land improvement (Devine 1988). Older discourses on the folklore of the North of Scotland, as elsewhere a century ago, tended to dwell on its decline due to change and progress--the devolutionary premise that Alan Dundes identified as explaining the supposed decline of folk traditions (1969). But certainly the declaration, in 1835, of the Cromarty stonemason and folklorist Hugh Miller was typical: I see the stream of tradition rapidly lessening as it flows onward, and displaying ... a broader and more powerful volume as trace it towards its source (Quoted Dorson 1968, 31). That concept of folklore devolving or diminishing embodied a set of older discourses constructed around the notion of folklore as survivals from an earlier stage of culture, or folklore as historical source. Ultimately, want to contrast these with a newer set of discourses and challenges as they affect the production of folklore: namely, folklore as cultural continuity and folklore as an emergent feature of contemporary life. …

: The Concept of Folklore . Paulo de Carvalho-Neto, Jacques M. P. Wilson.

American AnthropologistVolume 75, Issue 4 p. 1044-1046 Free Access Folklore: The Concept of Folklore. PAULO DE CARVALHO-NETO CLARENCE T. MALONEY, CLARENCE T. MALONEY Montclair State CollegeSearch for more papers by this author CLARENCE T. MALONEY, CLARENCE T. MALONEY Montclair State CollegeSearch for more papers by this author First published: August 1973 https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1973.75.4.02a00840AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Volume75, Issue4August 1973Pages 1044-1046 RelatedInformation

Folklore and the Africanist

THE FACT IS, ANTHROPOLOGISTS do not know what folklore (1 7); and anthropologist limits his concept of folklore to 'verbal art' (34), says Richard M. Dorson in Africa and the Folklorist.' By replying to these and other assertions in his introduction to African Folklore I may be inviting readers to think, If the shoe fits, put it on. In this case it seems to be running across the floor to my foot, like the golden shoe in the Hausa version of the Cinderella tale.2 Verbal of course, comes from my article with that title, published in 1955.3 It is inexcusable that any scholar, especially a historian, cites the term (9), without a date or footnote, in a context that implies that it is derived from used by Melville J. Herskovits in i96i,4 or from used by Jack Berry in I96o.5 The fact is that I was very surprised to see Herskovits use both and arts6 after I had left Evanston for Berkeley. And if Dorson read even the first sentence of Verbal Art, he must know that my use of the term in print goes back to I949.7 I have, of course, said that many anthropologists have traditionally limited the concept of folklore to verbal art, and some probably still do so today; but this situation has been changing rapidly as verbal art, spoken art, or oral art gain acceptance, and it is no longer necessary to use the term folklore when referring specifically to these literary forms. More than twenty years ago, Erminie W. Voegelin remarked on the noticeable tendency among cultural anthropologists

Romania and the Widening Gyre

tain a true picture of the course of modern literature, wrote Ernst Robert Curtius in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.' For Curtius, is a core concept in the study of European literature as a whole, as a manifold organism whose parts grow out from one another through time and space. Curtius, whose whole book is a plea for an erudite and painstaking philology, stands of course as one of the greatest representatives of the German tradition of Romance Philology in its richest, most all-embracing development. This tradition can, I think, be looked on as part of a larger search for origins which arises in the course of the eighteenth century, and belongs essentially to the Romantic movement. The first volume of Fredrich Diez's work, the cornerstone of Romance Philology, dates from 1836, and it develops from ideas and inquiries pursued earlier by A. W. Schlegel. Like the studies of Jacob Grimm and others, these searchings into a linguistic past are a product of the national and historical consciousness of Romanticism, the desire to uncover indigenous roots, which means an attention to the morphology and filiation of languages, genres, races, myths, civilizations. This consciousness reacts to the need to know what we are with the desire to know where we are, and how we got there. The concept of is hence in the nature of a myth of origins: the place, and also the process, where the modern vernacular literatures rose from the seedbed of vulgar Latin. Like the Grimm brothers' concept of folklore, it reaches back to a common ground, a trunk out of which one can discern the complex ramifications of the modern branches and foliage. For Curtius, and the methodology of Romance Philology alone permit a true comparative literature, because such a study must be rooted in origins, derivational, connective of cause and effect. I will return shortly to these methodological implications. First, it is worth entertaining the idea that if Romanticism invented as a context of study, it also destroyed it as a context of future literary creation. For all the confusions of Mme de Stael's celebrated distinction between the litterature du nord and the litterature du midi-a distinction between the indigenous, Christian romance traditions and imitation of Antiquity-it is clear that we have entered an age of complex literary cosmopolitanism, with new and intricate patterns of cross-cultural borrowing, and the feeling of any cohesion around Latinity is gone. She announces, and in some measure precipitates, the introduction of Germanomania and Shakespearophilia into the Romanic sphere, with the result that no morphology of the modern traditions of literature can be established within the sole context of Romania. I am not convinced that is in fact the most viable context for the study of the Renaissance or Neoclassicism; but certainly from Romanticism on through Realism, Symbolism, modernism and post-modernism, the context and the myth of origins, if not untrue, are no longer adequate. So the first sense of my title, Romania and the Widening Gyre, is simply this: that within the cycles of modern history from the late eighteenth century onward the center of will not hold. It may still be a distant root and trunk, but the student of genres, movements, and significant literary moments needs contexts other than Romania. Persistence in seeing the world in terms of will usually mean inadequate contextualization of the important modern moments and movements: the frame of Germany, England, and France, say, for Romanticism; the context of France, England, and Russia for the Realist novel; the total European context of Symbolism, the virtually global context of modernism. One effect of the link between Romantic nationalism, with its accompanying linguistic nationalism, and the rise of historical literary studies has been, as Rene Wellek and Austin Warren point out, too close a tie between the study of languages and the study of literatures, with a consequent overem-

Personal Power and Social Restraint in the Definition of Folklore

ANTHROPOLOGISTS SOMETIMES DISTINGUISH between ethnographers and ethnologists, those who go into the field to gather cultural information and those who develop theories about how and why this material operates. Folklorists do not make such a distinction; names both the discipline and the materials collected. Perhaps this situation exists because few folklorists have been theorists. Not that they have failed to consider what folklore is. Many folklorists have taken up this question; but few have bothered to consider their assumptions and the implications of the way in which they approach and organize their material, either to collect or annotate it. Obviously, how we define folklore has an important effect on the way we practice the discipline. For this reason, it seems important to reconsider periodically the meanings of and of other central terms of the discipline such as oral transmission, tradition, and folk. Not that it should be necessary to arrive at definitions shared by all folklorists; that would be both impossible and intellectually stultifying. Rather, we should seek to understand more fully the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches to the materials basic to our discipline. There are at least two ways one might view the concept of folklore: in one the traditional characteristics of lore are emphasized, with the usual concomitant, word-of-mouth transmission; in the other the emphasis is upon the performance characteristics of lore. The first approach emphasizes the ways in which folklore is a part of culture; the second focuses on the ways that folklore can have personal as well as social uses. these approaches are not mutually exclusive is, of course, clear. These definitions of folklore center not on what folklore is, but what it does and how it does it. To simply focus on the items and genres of folklore without questioning the reasons for their existence and continuity no longer seems useful to our discipline, though there still are some folklorists who prefer to point and say, That is folklore because I am a folklorist and that is what I and my col-

The American Concept of Folklore

It is probably unwise to speak of concept of as if there were just one. In past, and even in present, there has been considerable disagreement among folklorists as to nature of One is tempted to suggest that there have been almost as many of as there have been folklorists. Thus the concept of folklore can really only be discussed as some of folklore. By American I refer to North and more specifically to United States of America. The peoples of Latin America also consider themselves Americans and folklorists in Latin have been extremely active in last few decades, particularly with respect to formulating concepts of folklore.' However, various understandings of held by Latin folklorists differ quite radically from those championed by North folklorists and they will not be treated here. In discussing concept of I shall confine myself to folklorists' of inasmuch as a less specific topic would have to include views of general public. The public at large tends to think of as a synonym for error, fallacy, or historical inaccuracy. One hears, for example, phrase That's folklore, meaning That is not true, and while this does not

The Concept of Folklore in Yugoslavia

The Concept of Folklore in Yugoslavia